Here’s an astonishing sentence from the Wall Street Journal editorial board, a group whose support for cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of military detainees is persistent, unalloyed and enthusiastic. Notice this language:
As for “torture,” it is simply perverse to conflate the amputations and electrocutions Saddam once inflicted at Abu Ghraib with the lesser abuses committed by rogue American soldiers there, much less with any authorized U.S. interrogation techniques. No one has yet come up with any evidence that anyone in the U.S. military or government has officially sanctioned anything close to “torture.” The “stress positions” that have been allowed (such as wearing a hood, exposure to heat and cold, and the rarely authorized “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of suffocation) are all psychological techniques designed to break a detainee.
Notice that the gold-standard for American conduct is now set by Saddam Hussein! And “water-boarding” is merely a “psychological technique” that “induces a feeling of suffocation.” No physical coercion at all – unless you mean being tied to a plank and near-drowned. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of the tactic as currently used:
The most-current practice of waterboarding involves tieing the victim to a board with their head lower than their feet so that they are unable to move. A piece of cloth is held tightly over their face, and water is poured onto the cloth. Breathing is extremely difficult and the victim will be in imminent fear of death by asphyxiation; however, it is relatively difficult to aspirate a large amount of water since the lungs are higher than the mouth, and the victim is unlikely to actually expire if this is done by skilled torturers. This is the technique demonstrated on U.S. military personnel, by U.S. military personnel, when they are being taught to resist enemy interrogations in the event of capture (see SERE). It is this technique the U.S. military and CIA interrogators are suspected of using.
The WSJ doesn’t think this is torture. The technique was widely used in Algeria by the French and dates back to interrogation techniques developed in the sixteenth century religious wars. Here’s an image:
Remember: the Wall Street Journal disagrees with the notion that this is “anything close to torture.” (In this, their sixteenth century forefathers disagreed. They called this technique torture, as the engraving shows.) The Journal editors want water-boarding to be a legal interrogation technique. Well, at least we now know exactly what they believe – about torture and about America.
The Dish 